I'm in the process of loading most of my CD collection into iTunes (in anticipation of getting an iPod Classic in the near future) and was wondering why some songs take longer to download than others. Song length doesn't matter. Some shorter songs take considerably longer to load than other songs that have a much greater run time. Just curious...
Without knowing the details of where you're getting the tracks, what tracks they are, and what system you're doing this with, the best guess is that they were encoded differently.
Are you talking about actually ripping songs from CD's and then encoding them to a compressed format? A few reasons, off the top of my head, could be: 1. If ripping from a cd burnt non-professionally (an old cd burned by a buddy) it will be limited to being read at the speed it was burnt at. A 4x burn speed rips pretty slowly, for example. 2. Some type of processor bottleneck depending on the type of encoding - this is probably not it, since you're not talking about much processing power. That's all I got.
No, these are all commercial CDs. It just struck me as odd that one CD would load faster than another one, even though they both contain songs of similar lengths (or a slower-loading disc having shorter/fewer songs than one that loads pretty quickly). I'm thinking that Tuckerfan may have hit on the reason.
Have you tried reversing the polarity and initiating a feedback loop through the starboard power coupling?
That's all fine and dandy until the Polaron Deflectors detect the inverse linear tachyon pulses in those couplings and flat out disengage. :|
Most likely has to do with the physical quality of the discs you're trying to rip from, and, to a lesser extent if you have a computer built within the past couple of years, what else you're doing with the computer at the time. Song complexity can also have something to do with it, but not that much. dead space between tracks as well. If there's a lot and the laser actually has to seek, it can take a while (hundreds of milliseconds) to reestablish a lock on the track. Ironically, perhaps, this is actually easier with a burned CD than a pressed one; burned CD's have a physical, not just a logical, track, so the burn laser doesn't go astray. Encoding and burn speed have nothing to do with it -- probably. Encoding only matters if some of them are MP3 or WMA data CDs. All Audio CDs (bearing the CDDA logo) are encoded exactly the same - 2-channel, 44.1kHz sample rate, 16-bit linear PCM with cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding (CIRC) error correction. Burn speed has to do with it only insofar as if the media was flaky enough to force the burner down to a lower speed, it's going to be just as bad trying to read it at high speed. But physical disc quality is almost certainly the overriding factor; the reader can slow down and reread a segment with uncorrectable errors if it thinks the error might be due to a flaky disc at high speeds. If it does, it may stay slow for another track or three, depending on the error rate its seeing.
Could also be down to different ages of the discs. A little wear on the disc surface might not be apparent to you, but Skin bets that laser would notice. Would make the rip slower.
Do any discs have non-music content on them? Like, if you stick the disc into the computer does it load some sort of software? I've had issues with those types of discs - luckily they have gone out of style.
Yes. Some Sony discs have something nasty in them that loads up on your system if you don't disable auto-run. I'll see if I can find a link, but there was some brouhaha over this a few years ago. EDIT: Voila. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
I've noticed that many older CD's (pre 96-97 for instance) rip wayyyy quicker than many modern discs. Again, there's so many variables at play here, that could be coincidence.
